Bandai Namco Might be Teasing a New Souls Game

Barely has the dust settled on the Ringed City before Bandai Namco is teasing a return to Souls: or, at least, that's what the publisher's chosen hashtag #PrepareToDine suggests. Dark Souls was, of course, released in a complete form as the 'Prepare to Die' edition and, even more intriguingly, one of the key lines in the final section of Dark Souls 3 is "let the feast begin."

But this doesn't look like another Souls, even if elements of the teaser are highly reminiscent of the series.

A bigger influence, I'd say, is Bloodborne — the hunched figure halfway through, whose shadow we see beginning to convulse under a change. The blood that runs from the woman's smiling mouth in the opening seconds. A huge bonfire around a beast's skeleton. The glimpses of enemies we get, vaguely humanoid werewolves. Most striking of all is that the character at the end uses a rifle with a bayonet to slash through her foes, which echoes several Bloodborne weapons (Dark Souls, of course, had no guns).

Now, I know nothing. But what this is saying to me is that someone at Bandai Namco looked at Salt and Sanctuary and thought they could do better. It doesn't look like a Fromsoft game. If I had to put money on it, this is some loosely-affiliated 2D Souls spinoff.

You won't have to wait too long to find out just how wrong I am: Bandai Namco say the game will be officially announced on April 20th.